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Affinia - new tool to deliver strategic life insurance advice

National risk-focused dealer group Affinia Financial Advisers has developed a new tool to help advisers deliver strategic life insurance advice that meets the highest standards of ‘best interests’.

The Strategic Advice Cashflow Tool, encompassing a needs analysis and cashflow calculator, is being rolled out across the group as a central part of Affinia’s risk management framework, enabling advisers to comprehensively meet all of the elements of strategic life insurance advice .

Affinia General Manager Craig Parker said: “The tool facilitates meaningful conversations between advisers and clients so that the service provided is built around high quality, valuable advice and risk management strategies, not products.

“This is about moving the conversation with clients away from insurance products and towards fully understanding client needs, and developing strategies and delivering solutions to meet those needs, and then reviewing them regularly.”

One of the key callouts from ASIC’s 2014 Review of Life Insurance Advice last year was the lack of an industry-accepted definition of ‘Strategic Life Insurance Advice’, though the report itself provided a brief description as well as a checklist.

Affinia believes strategic life insurance advice has a direct correlation to the globally accepted definition of ‘Risk Management’ as classified by ISO 31000.

This states, ‘Risk Management is the coordinated activities to direct and control outcomes with regard to risk. At its most effective, Risk management is fully integrated into the planning and management of an organisation across all levels.’

“Affinia has developed a risk management framework that defines and unpacks what strategic life insurance advice is,” Craig said. “Risk advice practices need to be built on the foundations of providing strategic advice, and our new framework, including the tool, provides the system to do that.”

The key elements of Affinia’s framework are:

A diagnostic tool

Risk identification

Exposure analysis

Strategy formulation

Implementation, and

Regular and ongoing audits and reviews.

Craig said that for risk professionals, the framework is applied under Affinia’s four pillars of risk advice which target client discussions around:

Affinia is a new dealer group for risk advisers. Set up by risk specialists, for risk specialists, we want to do things differently. We're backed by TAL, Australia's leading specialist life insurer. Come and see us at www.affinia.com.au